Return code when OOM killer kills a process

Question

I am running a multiprogrammed workload (based on SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks) on a POWER7 system using SUSE SLES 11.

Sometimes, each application in the workload consumes

Answer 1

The Linux OOM killer works by sending SIGKILL. If your process is killed by the OOM it's fishy that WIFEXITED returns 1.

TLPI

To kill the selected process, the OOM killer delivers a SIGKILL signal.

So you should be able to test this using:

if (WIFSIGNALED(status)) {
    if (WTERMSIG(status) == SIGKILL)
        printf("Killed by SIGKILL\n");
}